The Competitiveness of Agricultural Foreign Trade Commodities of the CR Assessed by Way of the Lafay Index

The article deals with agricultural foreign trade of the Czech Republic in the period of 2008 – 2011. For the whole sector structure of agricultural production – 24 aggregations of commodities structured according to chapters of food goods - it attempts to ascertain how the individual commodities are faring on the foreign market. It presents several tools for the assessment of competitiveness. Primarily, this includes the Balassa auxiliary RCA (Revealed Comparative Advantage) index, and the Lafay index. The last, most comprehensive criterion was utilized – the Lafay index. For the years in question, attention is first given to the overall development of agricultural foreign trade (AFT), the value of export and import is summarized, and the balance and turnover is calculated. The territorial structure is shown, total export is studied, as well as export into the EU 27 countries, into the three countries that are the biggest trading partners (Germany, Slovakia, Poland) and into third countries. For the last year, 2011, the results for the aggregations of commodities that show up on the given market are processed into clear tables, with the order of the first five aggregations of commodities being shown. The results for the year 2008 are set out briefly, and changes in the structure that occurred within the past four years are discussed. The article was prepared as part of the Research Project MSM 6046070906 “Economics of Resources of Czech Agriculture and Their Effective Utilization within Multifunctional Agricultural-Food Systems”